I pulled out a random copy of Seventeen from the pile, hesitated, then pulled out another one and put them both into the box, firmly telling myself that when it was full, there would be no second box.

This decision simultaneously made me feel better and more stressed, but I took a deep breath and leaned forward, reaching for whatever was next on the unreviewed pile.

“Oh, wow,” I breathed. It was a December 1964 copy of Life magazine, with a photo of a gorgeous, tousled-hair Elizabeth Taylor in full-blown color, accompanied by the teaser headline of elizabeth taylor talks about herself.

Since I’d had a fascination with the actor ever since I was nine and I’d watched National Velvet during a nasty episode of strep throat, I started flipping through the pages to find the article.

Halfway there, I stopped, thinking about the article’s title.

Elizabeth Taylor had talked about herself, and that was something Brown and Emily would never be able to do again. Their voices were forever silenced, cut off before they’d had a chance to finish talking.

What I really needed to do was find a way to listen to their voices.

*   *   *

“Hello, hello, hello, Minnie!” A wide-smiled Lindy opened her front door wide and let me in. “I’m so glad you called. It’s been a quiet day and I was starting to wonder what I was going to do with myself.”

She put my coat into the front closet and led me into the dining room. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be hungry, and I wasn’t sure what you liked.”

As soon as I entered the room, it became all too clear what she’d done in the time between my phone call and my arrival on the Bernier doorstep. The table was crowded with snacks of all shapes and sizes. Cheese and crackers. Grapes, strawberries, and melon. Tortilla chips and salsa. Spiraled rolls of ham and cream cheese. Chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and even a cake. How had she assembled all this in three hours?

Lindy looked at the spread on the dining table, looked at me, then back at the table. “I might have gone a little overboard,” she said uncertainly.

I stood there, staring at an amount of food that would feed thirty people, and tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t make Lindy feel stupid. As I floundered for words, I heard a small sniffing and looked over to see tears streaming down her cheeks.

Without saying a thing, I went to her and gave her a long hug, rubbing her back and letting her cry and cry and cry.